change of plan to my house - adding WHS and have some questions

[newstuart]

Hi
right, after the last year with WHS sat in its case I have finally decided to bite the bullet and change my house system around to hopefully maximise the MCE/WHS experience.

The plan is to have 1 WHS pc running 24/7, 1 HTPC which will run the main tv and handle scheduled recordings, 3 x extenders

My questions are,

1) Can i record tv straight from the htpc to the WHS as a network drive? I want to install a 30gb ssd drive on the htpc and no other drives in it and need to record straight to the whs for this to work

2) I have read that WHS will now run the MCE extenders, can anyone confirm what interface this would provide to them (IE Windows 7)? This is key as I still need to be able to use the extenders with the HTPC turned off

3) Using the extenders in this way can I access recorded tv etc from the WHS?

4) Again with the extenders can I access Video_TS movies via Transcode 360 and My Movies3 via WHS?

thanks folks[/align]

[Jam3s]

Hey, sorry I don't really know anything about WHS or MCE, but for question 1 I'm guessing you can record onto a network. Windows allows you to map a network drive to a drive letter, so surely you can use this mapped drive to record onto. I'm just making assumptions there.

[newstuart]

Hi

That was my thoughts aswell but just wanted to clarify I could do this with WHS as otherwise I would need to keep a seperate drive in the HTPC just for WHS to "Back up" the copy of it onto WHS which seems a little pointless

[elootos]

You can't record to a network drive. It will only allow local drives. A real bummer but I think its Win7 covering its arse with potential bandwidth issues.

At the moment, recorded material is stored locally then moved across to the server once the program has finished. If you don't have WHS then there are some mods you can run to create an automated task to do the same thing to some NAS.

Programs don't tend to be more than about 5Gb at most (unless it's a marathon HD broadcast) so a 30Gb drive should still be ok.

WHS running extenders? Is this in the new Vail? I know it has a load of new features and you can download the beta from the Microsoft Connect site so perhaps a test is in order.

There's also the DVBLink you can run on the server to stream tuners to the remote PCs.